On the heels of my post regarding the Army (and the larger DoD) budget crunch, I came across William Christie’s Is Iraq Vietnam? Moving past academic arguments comparing the two conflicts, Christie examines the military’s response to defeat in Vietnam:

Losing was something their successors had no conception of. We need to realize that the Second World War was the only truly decisive military campaign since Rome’s final destruction of Carthage in the Third Punic War (149-146 BC). Yet the U.S. military has been hungering for decisive battle ever since. If you have enormous resources at your disposal and no conception of defeat (or at least no conception of any consequences to defeat), then you can be like General William Westmoreland in Vietnam and insist on applying the concept of military operations you’re most comfortable with in a situation totally unsuited for it.

Westmoreland’s orientation, however, didn’t lead to a happy outcome. Defeat usually spurs innovation, yet in the aftermath of defeat in Vietnam the Army decided that it hadn’t been defeated, merely stabbed in the back by politicians and the media (see Keegan). I personally heard this expressed often by senior officers well into the late 1980’s. So the Army decided that the lesson it needed to learn was not how to defeat an insurgency, rather it was to never get involved in anything like Vietnam again. So with lightning speed it turned its attention to the war it wanted to fight: conventional tank battles with the Soviet Union on the north German plain.

This has been the trend from then on: Planning for the war you want to fight, rather than the one you’re most likely to fight.

The Powell Doctrine reflects this commitment to never, ever, get involved in anything like Vietnam ever again. This meant that the trauma of Vietnam was defined away, for a few decades at least. We wouldn’t ever do that again because we would only do conventional operations orchestrated around a decisive battle. To ask the military to do anything else would be inappropriate because that isn’ t it’s job. This was quite a shift, since as Christie points out:

…the Army’s cluelessness about counterinsurgency has largely been a later 20th and 21st century phenomenon, because it did wage successful campaigns against both Native Americans and insurgents in the Philippines.

By refusing to plan for the war it doesn’t want to fight, the DoD was able to keep investing only in capabilities that reflected the war it wanted to be used. How likely this war was seems to have been glossed over with discussions of the “lesser included” contingencies. Until OIF, of course.

Senior Army officials concede they mistakenly assumed prior to the Iraq war that if they built a force capable of winning big conventional battles, everything else — from counterinsurgency to peacekeeping — would be relatively easy. “We argued in those days that if we could do the top-end skills, we could do all of the other ones,” says Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the deputy commander of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command. Iraq has proven that guerrilla fights demand different equipment and skills. “I have had to eat a little crow,” says Gen. Metz.[1]

While the first Gulf War was heralded in some circles as an exercising of the ghosts of Vietnam, OIF represents the true confrontation with the nightmares of that defeat three decades ago. The post-Vietnam maneuver warfare renaissance didn’t exercise the trepidation caused by counterinsurgency. That task falls to the current generation. Technical and bureaucratic solutions will have to cease being the primary option considered. Weapons systems will have to fit doctrine, instead of doctrine having to fit the weapons. The question is, how long will it take?

[1] Greg Jaffe, “Despite Its $168 Billion Budget, The Army Faces A Cash Crunch,” Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2006, Pg. 1.